Jon Keeling (R-VA) can’t help himself… continues to lie about polls

Jon Keeling goes to the well again, but still refuses to acknowledge that he lied when he suggested that a) Nate Silver agreed Strickland was toast, and b) most professional pollsters are saying that the Quinny poll is actually great news for Kasich.

This time, Keeling has the nerve to suggest that Nate Silver is being dishonest:

Silver, who is unabashedly liberal, is being a bit dishonest with the numbers by isolating the single Quinnipiac poll in his analysis of where the race stands.If he wanted to play fair, he would use the same standard he used in his overall analysis, the incumbent’s average in the early polls, and according to Pollster.com, Strickland is averaging 40.5%.

Strickland’s average is that low for two reasons: 1) Rasmussen has polled nearly three times as often recently as any other polling outfit and has consistently showed substantially lower numbers than the other polling outfits, 2) Pollster.com includes a poll done by the Ohio Right to Life that claims that Strickland is only poll 33%… a result so ridiculous that not even Keeling himself bothered to even mention the existence of such a poll. So, you can imagine with only four polls during the last few months, how much the Ohio Right to Life could distort Strickland’s average.

(Even Robert Moran, the pollster Keeling cited in his first post as evidence that the “professional polling community” is balking at the Quinny poll being portrayed as good news has backed off on his comments. Moran calls the Right to Life survey “hard to believe,” thus justifying its exclusion.)

If you looked at only the polls conducted so far this year and exclude the Right to Life poll, Strickland leads by 43% to 40%. That puts Strickland in the mid 40-s range even Keeling admits is relatively safe harbor.

Keeling also claims that the Quinny poll is “just one poll”:

First, Keeling ignores that it’s not just the “single Quinnipiac poll that shows” that Strickland is polling at or near 45%. The University of Cincinnati polls showed the same thing.

Other Keeling whoppers:

“The trend shows Kasich is stagnant, and will likely remain that way until his name ID improves.”

I guess it depends on your definition of “virtually.” Either way, the polling data does not even show Kasich is stagnant. Even taking just the most favorable polling organization for Kasich, Rasmussen Reports, you have enough of a trend line to see that Kasich’s trending downward in a head-to-head against Strickland.

Coupled with the trend data from Quinnipiac, and you have the only polling organizations which have done enough polling to suggest any trend, and they BOTH show Kasich has been losing ground somewhere between 3 to 5 points since December. That’s the result of the disaster that was the Mary Taylor rollout and the press coverage on Kasich and Taylor utter inability to explain their own tax plan or how they’d pay for it. That suggests that as voters get engaged the tax attack will move the race even further.

On a side note, this trend is strange given that the convention wisdom that the electoral environment is said to favor challengers against incumbents, and yet, Rob Portman is doing better in his open seat race than John Kasich is doing against a Democratic incumbent. Some day, someone in the media is going to point that out.

I don’t know why Keeling keeps writing about the Quinnipiac poll. He’s actually written about it more than the polls showing Kasich ahead. But it’s a clear indication that the Kasich campaign is freaking out about it.